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The life of the great Guyanese scholar and revolutionary Walter Rodney burned with a rare intensity. The son of working class parents, Rodney showed great academic promise and was awarded scholarships to the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and the School of African and Oriental Studies in London. He received his PhD from the latter at the age of twenty-four, and his thesis was published as A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, now a classic of African history. His most famous work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, is a mainstay of radical literature and anticipated the influential world systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein.

Not content merely to study the world, Rodney turned to revolutionary politics in Jamaica, Tanzania, and in Guyana. In his homeland, he helped form the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) and was a consistent voice for the oppressed and exploited. As Rodney became more popular, the threat of his revolutionary message stirred fears among the powerful in Guyana and throughout the Caribbean, and he was assassinated in 1980.

A 7,000-year-old man whose bones were left behind in a Spanish cave had the dark skin of an African, but the blue eyes of a Scandinavian. He was a hunter-gatherer who ate a low-starch diet and couldn’t digest milk well — which meshes with the lifestyle that predated the rise of agriculture. But his immune system was already starting to adapt to a new lifestyle.

Richard Hart, one of the Caribbean’s foremost political thinkers and authors, passed away at his home in Bristol on December 21 aged 96.

He was born Ansell Richard Hart on August 13 1917 in Kingston, Jamaica, the youngest of four children.

His father Ansell Hart was a solicitor and renowned author. Educated in both Jamaica and Britain, it is perhaps no coincidence that a man born in the year of the Bolshevik revolution would forgo his position of privilege to become a champion of the causes of working people and human rights.

Hart was first and foremost a political activist and one of the founders of the People’s National Party (PNP) of Jamaica in 1938, the party which forms Jamaica’s incumbent centre-left government.

In 1942 his political activism brought him to the attention of the British colonial government which ordered his imprisonment without trial for his political activities.

Later as cold war anti-communist sentiment reached the Caribbean, the PNP expelled Hart as part of the group of “four Hs” – Richard Hart, Arthur Henry, Frank Hill and Ken Hill – in 1952.

Hart’s expulsion led him to join other more radical thinkers and activists to form the People’s Freedom Movement, later renamed the Socialist Party of Jamaica, which campaigned fervently for better rights for all Jamaicans until it ceased to operate in 1962.

Hart engaged labour and trade union struggles in tandem with his political activism throughout the 1940s and ’50s.

He campaigned for better conditions for both agricultural and industrial workers and served as general secretary of the Caribbean Labour Congress (CLC) from 1947-53.

Succumbing to pressure from the United States, several Caribbean leaders conspired to have Hart removed as CLC leader because of his militancy and pro-labour stance.

Hart also played a pivotal role in Jamaica‘s struggle for independence and in the pan-Caribbean discussions of the ’50s and ’60s on the need for a federation of Caribbean states, led by Grenada‘s Theophilus Albert Marryshow.

In 1962, following the folding of the Socialist Party of Jamaica and in the year of Jamaica’s independence, Hart moved to Guyana to work with his friend Cheddi Jagan of the People’s Progressive Party, who in 1961 had been reinstated as chief minister of Guyana.

Hart served as the editor of the party paper, The Mirror, writing about the lives of one of the country’s indigenous groups, the Arawak people.

In the mid-’60s, Hart moved to London, where he worked as a solicitor until 1982.

He was a founding member of Caribbean Labour Solidarity (CLS), remaining an honorary president up to the time of his death.

CLS was set up in 1974 to provide support and solidarity to the struggles of workers in the Caribbean.

In 1982 Hart was invited by the people’s revolutionary government of Grenada to provide assistance on law reform and was instrumental in assisting that country with the drafting of laws to aid the country’s economic and social transformation, including the maternity leave law which provided for rights and the fair treatment of pregnant women.

In 1983 he was appointed attorney general, a post he held until the US invasion of Grenada on October 25 that year.

Following the invasion he immediately set about placing the discourse in an anti-imperialist context and campaigning for a fair trial for the group known as the Grenada 17.

Throughout Hart’s career he was a prolific researcher and writer.

He wrote a number of significant historical works over the years including The Grenada Trial: A Travesty of Justice (1996) which exposed the fundamental flaws in the trial of the former Grenada revolutionaries.

Hart’s scholarship extended to works on Marcus Garvey, Cuba, Grenada and workers’ struggles throughout the Caribbean.

Hart, throughout his long political career, defined by principle, stoicism and struggle, never retreated from his Marxist views.

Even when he was readmitted to the PNP in 2001, he remained steadfast to the very political philosophy which had caused his earlier expulsion.

Hart was not interested in honours or personal gain but was delighted to be awarded an honorary degree by the University of the West of England in 2004, a Gold Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica for his work in the field of historical research both in Jamaica and the Caribbean in 2005 and an honorary doctorate by the University of the West Indies in the same year.

In 2011 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Hull. These awards were a testimony of the extent of his scholarship, posited within a radical Marxist interpretation of history, and will contribute to the rich legacy of Caribbean history and writings that he bestows.

Hart was a serious man who believed in setting the record straight and campaigning for the rights of humanity was his passion.

But Hart, who excelled in chess, also had a keen penchant for music, including the music of Paul Robeson, Jamaican folk music and the works of Bob Marley, and could often be seen dancing away at the many socials which accompanied his political work.

Hart leaves to mourn his wife Avis, four children including Gordon and Robin from a first marriage and Andrew and Siu-Ming, eight grandchildren, two grandchildren and his extended family in Jamaica and comrades and friends around the world.

It was 1974 when I first met Richard “Dick” Hart, during a visit to Jamaica.

The People’s National Party government of Michael Manley, in office since 1972, was not exactly in a progressive phase at that time – although this would change dramatically within a matter of months.

In 1974, a purpose-built “gun court,” ostensibly set up to crack down on gun crime, was in fact casting its net rather wider and imposing draconian penalties on those unfortunate enough to fall within its broad remit.

At the same time, the government was planning to hold the trade union movement in check with a bill modelled on the Heath government’s Industrial Relations Act.

Back in London, I contacted Hart again and he arranged a meeting at the Highbury home of Lionel “Jeff” Jeffrey, a Guyanese activist.

Also present was Cleston “Chris” Taylor, formerly a Jamaican trade unionist and a veteran of a sugar workers’ strike in Jamaica and the building workers’ struggles on London’s Barbican site.

While others would join us soon enough, I believe it was just the four of us at that initial meeting, at which we decided to organise a Jamaica Trade Union Defence Committee.

This swiftly evolved, given the leftward trajectory of Manley’s government, into Caribbean Labour Solidarity.

This period saw the first real resurgence of the Jamaican left since Hart and others had been expelled from the People’s National Party in 1952, and Hart was one of the few from the old generation who retained his beliefs.

I last saw Hart in 2003, when I invited him to speak to a meeting of black and white bus workers in north London on the development of the labour movement in Jamaica.

The aim was to demonstrate that the histories of the working people of the Caribbean and Britain are linked and that their struggles have been remarkably similar.

Hart, then a chipper 85, travelled up from Bristol, where he had made his home in latter years, and made a deep impression on the regretfully modest audience.

Like Nelson Mandela and William Pomeroy, Dick Hart died in his nineties. Of course we will miss him. But when someone has lived such a long and meaningful life, it is more appropriate that we celebrate that life rather than mourn its end.

Monique Pool, CI partner and founder of the Green Heritage Fund Suriname, finds herself “slothified” after an area of forest in Paramaribo, Suriname, is cut down. Monique rescued more than 200 animals, mostly sloths, and brought them to an emergency shelter, which also happens to be her home. Watch how Monique manages to feed, house, and release the sloths back into the wild.

During the course of 2013, we were fortunate to have met and worked with three amazing conservation champions who are important friends and partners to CI.

1. Monique Pool, from the greenest country on earth — Suriname — became “slothified” when she rescued over 200 sloths out of a patch of forest that was being cleared for cattle pasture. All animals were brought to her house and eventually released back into a protected forest. Her drive and passion for these animals is so inspiring to us.

2. Nan Hauser from the Cook Islands in the South Pacific seduced us with her contagious strength and spirit. Her whale research and deep passion and understanding for these amazing marine mammals have helped create one of the largest marine parks in the world.

3. And finally, Sydney Allicock from Guyana. Indigenous leader, member of parliament, ecotourism pioneer, charismatic storyteller — these are just a few words to describe how this conservation champion has conserved his people’s traditional ways of life, protected their forests and biodiversity, and thus improved his people’s livelihoods.

The UK Foreign Office has made public the first batch of thousands of “lost” colonial era files which were believed to have been destroyed. The classified papers reveal instructions that sensitive material relating to potential abuses should be burned before handing over to local governments.

Edward Hampshire at the National Archives explained what kind of things were in the records.

David also revealed that the name of Barack Hussein Obama, father of the US President was also on a document relating to the named of Kenyan students who were studying in the US in 1959. In a strange twist of irony, the US government said, they believed Kenyan students to be anti-American and anti-white.

And if you are interested in seeing a part of history with your own eyes, then go to the National Archives at Kew to see 1,300 records displayed.

Fifty-year-old documents that have finally been transferred to the National Archive show that bonfires were built behind diplomatic missions across the globe as the purge – codenamed Operation Legacy – accompanied the handover of each colony.

The declassified documents include copies of an instruction issued in 1961 by Iain Macleod, colonial secretary, that post-independence governments should not be handed any material that “might embarrass Her Majesty’s [the] government”, that could “embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others eg police informers”, that might betray intelligence sources, or that might “be used unethically by ministers in the successor government”.

In Northern Rhodesia, colonial officials were issued with further orders to destroy “all papers which are likely to be interpreted, either reasonably or by malice, as indicating racial prejudice or religious bias on the part of Her Majesty’s government”.

Detailed instructions were issued over methods of destruction, in order to erase all evidence of the purge. When documents were burned, “the waste should be reduced to ash and the ashes broken up”, while any that were being dumped at sea must be “packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast”.

Also among the documents declassified on Friday are “destruction certificates” sent to London by colonial officials as proof that they were performing their duties, and letters and memoranda that showed that some were struggling to complete their huge task before the colonies gained their independence. Officials in more than one colony warned London that they feared they would be “celebrating Independence Day with smoke”.

An elaborate and at times confusing classification system was introduced, in addition to the secret/top secret classifications, to protect papers that were to be destroyed or shipped to the UK. Officials were often granted or refused security clearance on the grounds of ethnicity.

Documents marked “Guard”, for example, could be disclosed to non-British officials as long as if they were from the “Old Commonwealth” – Australia, New Zealand, South Africa or Canada.

Those classified as “Watch”, and stamped with a red letter W, were to be removed from the country or destroyed. Steps were taken to ensure post-colonial governments would not learn that such files had ever existed, with one instruction stating: “The legacy files must leave no reference to watch material. Indeed, the very existence of the watch series, though it may be guessed at, should never be revealed.” Officials were warned to keep their W stamps locked away.

The marking “DG” was said to be an abbreviation of deputy governor, but in fact was a protective code word to indicate that papers so marked were for sight by “British officers of European descent only”.

As colonies passed into a transitional phase before full independence, with British civil servants working for local government ministers, an entire parallel series of documents marked Personal were created. “Personal” files could be seen only by British governors and their British aides, a system that appears to have been employed in every territory from which the British withdrew after 1961. “The existence of the ‘Personal’ series of correspondence must of course be scrupulously protected and no documents in this series should be transferred to ministers,” colonial officials were warned.

While thousands of files were returned to London during the process of decolonisation, it is now clear that countless numbers of documents were destroyed. “Emphasis is placed upon destruction,” colonial officials in Kenya were told.

Officials in Aden were told to start burning in 1966, a full 12 months before the eventual British withdrawal. “It may seem a bit early to start talking about the disposal of documents prior to independence, but the sifting of documents is a considerable task and you may like to start thinking about it now.”

As in many colonies, a three-man committee – comprising two senior administrators and one police special branch officer – decided what would be destroyed and what would be removed to London. The paucity of Aden documentation so far declassified may suggest that the committee decided that most files should be destroyed.

In Belize, colonial administrators officials told London in October 1962 that a visiting MI5 officer had decided that all sensitive files should be destroyed by fire: “In this he was assisted by the Royal Navy and several gallons of petrol.”

In British Guiana, a shortage of “British officers of European descent” resulted in the “hot and heavy” task falling to two secretaries, using a fire in an oil drum in the grounds of Government House. Eventually the army agreed to lend a hand.

The declassified papers show colonial officials asking for further advice about what should and should not be destroyed. In 1963, for example, an official in Malta asked London for advice about which files should be “spirited away out of the country”, and warned that while some documents could be handed over to the new government: “There may again be others which could be given to them if they were doctored first; and there may be files which cannot be given to them under any circumstances.”

In June 1966, Max Webber, the high commissioner in Brunei, asked Bernard Cheeseman, chief librarian at the Commonwealth Relations Office, for advice about 60 boxes of files. “My Dear Cheese,” he wrote, “can I, off my own bat, destroy some of these papers, or should the whole lot be sent home for weeding or retention in your records?”

Not all sensitive documents were destroyed. Large amounts were transferred to London, and held in Foreign Office archives. Colonial officials were told that crates of documents sent back to the UK by sea could be entrusted only to the “care of a British ship’s master on a British ship”.

For example, Robert Turner, the chief secretary of the British protectorate of North Borneo, wrote to the Colonial Office library in August 1963, a few weeks before independence, saying his subordinate’s monthly reports – “which would be unsuitable for the eyes of local ministers” – would be saved and sent to London, rather than destroyed. “I … have been prevailed upon to do so on the grounds that some at least of their contents may come in handy when some future Gibbon is doing research work for his ‘Decline and Fall of the British Empire’.”

Those papers that were returned to London were not open to historians, however. The declassified documents made available Friday at the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, are from a cache of 8,800 of colonial-era files that the Foreign Office held for decades, in breach of the 30-years rule of the Public Records Acts and in effect beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act. They were stored behind barbed-wire fences at Hanslope Park, Buckinghamshire, a government communications research centre north of London, a facility that it operates along with MI6 and MI5.

Even then, however, the Foreign Office failed to acknowledge that the 8,800 colonial files were just a small part of a secret archive of 1.2m files that it called the Special Collections, and which it had held unlawfully at Hanslope Park.

The Foreign Office is understood to have presented a plan to the National Archive earlier this month for the belated transfer of the Special Collections into the public domain. On Thursday it declined to disclose details of that plan.

The newly declassified documents show that the practice of destroying papers rather than allowing them to fall into the hands of post-independence governments pre-dated Macleod’s 1961 instructions.

A British colonial official in Malaya reported that in August 1957, for example, “five lorry loads of papers … were driven down to the naval base at Singapore, and destroyed in the Navy’s splendid incinerator there. The Army supplied the lorries (civilian type) and laid on Field Security Personnel to move the files. Considerable pains were nevertheless taken to carry out the operations discreetly, partly to avoid exacerbating relationships between the British government and those Malayans who might not have been so understanding … and partly to avoid comment by the press (who I understand greatly enjoyed themselves with the pall of smoke which hung over Delhi during the mass destruction of documents in 1947).”

A few years later, colonial officials in Kenya were urged not to follow the Malayan example: “It is better for too much, rather than too little, to be sent home – the wholesale destruction, as in Malaya, should not be repeated.”

• This article was amended on 29 November 2013 to replace part of a sentence that had been accidentally deleted during the editing process.

October 2013. A previously unknown genus of electric fish has been identified in a remote region of South America by a team of international researchers including University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) professor Nathan Lovejoy.

The Akawaio penak, a thin, eel-like electric fish, was discovered in the shallow, murky waters of the upper Mazaruni River in northern Guyana. Lovejoy’s team at UTSC analyzed tissue samples collected during a recent expedition by a researchers led by Hernán López-Fernández at the Royal Ontario Museum. By sequencing its DNA and reconstructing an evolutionary tree, Lovejoy’s team discovered the fish is so distinct it represents a new genus, the taxonomic classification level above species.

Biological diversity hotspot

The upper Mazaruni River is a hotspot for biological diversity, yet remains largely unexplored because of its remote location. The area contains countless rivers on top of a series of uplands that have remained isolated from the rest of South America for more than 30 million years.

“The fact this area is so remote and has been isolated for such a long time means you are quite likely to find new species,” says Lovejoy. Like other electric knifefish, Akawaio penak has a long organ running along the base of the body that produces an electric field. The electric field is too weak to stun prey but is instead used to navigate, detect objects and to communicate with other electric fish. This trait is advantageous given the murky habitats of the fish.

The species is named in honour of the Akawaio Amerindians that populate the upper Mazaruni. The region is increasingly suffering from freshwater habitat degradation as a consequence of gold-mining in the area.

“The Mazaruni contains many unique species that aren’t found anywhere else in the world. It’s an extremely important area in South America in terms of biodiversity,” says Lovejoy.

November 2013: Plans to build a massive hydro-electric dam on the land of two unique tribes in Guyana would lead to the destruction of a unique people and vast tracts of rainforest says anthropologist Dr Audrey Butt Colson: here.